Croatia

Sign language gloss translation aims to translate the sign glosses into spoken language texts, which is challenging due to the scarcity of labeled gloss-text parallel data. Back translation (BT), which generates pseudo-parallel data by translating in-domain spoken language texts into sign glosses, has been applied to alleviate the data scarcity problem. However, the lack of large-scale high-quality in-domain spoken language text data limits the effect of BT. In this paper, to overcome the limitation, we propose a Prompt based domain text Generation (PGen) approach to produce the large-scale in-domain spoken language text data. Specifically, PGen randomly concatenates sentences from the original in-domain spoken language text data as prompts to induce a pre-trained language model (i.e., GPT-2) to generate spoken language texts in a similar style. Experimental results on three benchmarks of sign language gloss translation in varied languages demonstrate that BT with spoken language texts generated by PGen significantly outperforms the compared methods. In addition, as the scale of spoken language texts generated by PGen increases, the BT technique can achieve further improvements, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. We release the code and data for facilitating future research in this field.

EACL 2023

Scaling Back-Translation with Domain Text Generation for Sign Language Gloss Translation

sign language gloss translation; prompt learning; back translation

poster

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Automatic headline generation systems have the potential to assist editors in finding interesting headlines to attract visitors or readers. However, the performance of headline generation systems remains challenging due to the unavailability of sufficient parallel data for low-resource languages like Bengali and the lack of ideal approaches to develop a system for headline generation using pre-trained language models, especially for long news articles. To address these challenges, we present Shironaam, a large-scale dataset in Bengali containing over 240K news article-headline pairings with auxiliary data such as image captions, topic words, and category information. Unlike other headline generation models, this paper uses this auxiliary information to better model this task. Furthermore, we utilize the contextualized language models to design encoder-decoder model for Bengali news headline generation and follow a simple yet cost-effective coarse-to-fine approach using topic-words to retrieve important sentences considering the fixed length requirement of the pre-trained language models. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on our dataset containing news articles of 13 different categories to demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating auxiliary information and evaluate our system on a wide range of metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods bring significant improvements (i.e., 3 to 10 percentage points across all evaluation metrics) over the baselines. Also to illustrate the utility and robustness, we report experimental results in few-shot and non-few-shot settings.

Shironaam: Bengali News Headline Generation using Auxiliary Information

Prior studies in privacy policies frame the question answering (QA) task as identifying the most relevant text segment or a list of sentences from a policy document given a user query. Existing labeled datasets are heavily imbalanced (only a few relevant segments), limiting the QA performance in this domain. In this paper, we develop a data augmentation framework based on ensembling retriever models that captures the relevant text segments from unlabeled policy documents and expand the positive examples in the training set. In addition, to improve the diversity and quality of the augmented data, we leverage multiple pre-trained language models (LMs) and cascaded them with noise reduction oracles.
Using our augmented data on the PrivacyQA benchmark, we elevate the existing baseline by a large margin (10\% F1) and achieve a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 50\%. Our ablation studies provide further insights into the effectiveness of our approach.

Retrieval Enhanced Data Augmentation for Question Answering on Privacy Policies

Modern NLP systems exhibit a range of biases, which a growing literature on model debiasing attempts to correct. However, current progress is hampered by a plurality of definitions of bias, means of quantification, and oftentimes vague relation between debiasing algorithms and theoretical measures of bias. This paper seeks to clarify the current situation and plot a course for meaningful progress in fair learning, with two key contributions: (1) making clear inter-relations among the current gamut of methods, and their relation to fairness theory; and (2) addressing the practical problem of model selection, which involves a trade-off between fairness and accuracy and has led to systemic issues
in fairness research. Putting them together, we make several recommendations to help shape future work.

Fair Enough: Standardizing Evaluation and Model Selection for Fairness Research in NLP

Existing work in document-level neural machine translation commonly concatenates several consecutive sentences as a pseudo-document, and then learns inter-sentential dependencies. This strategy limits the model's ability to leverage information from distant context. We overcome this limitation with a novel Document Flattening (DocFlat) technique that integrates Flat-Batch Attention (FBA) and Neural Context Gate (NCG) into Transformer model to utilizes information beyond the pseudo-document boundaries. FBA allows the model to attend to all the positions in the batch and model the relationships between positions explicitly and NCG identifies the useful information from the distant context. We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses on three benchmark datasets for English-German translation, and validate the effectiveness of two variants of DocFlat. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms strong baselines with statistical significance on BLEU, COMET and accuracy on the contrastive test set. The analyses highlight that DocFlat is highly effective in capturing the long-range information.

Document Flattening: Beyond Concatenating Context for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation

The Bar-Hillel construction is a classic result in formal language theory. It shows, by a simple construction, that the intersection of a context-free language and a regular language is itself context-free. In the construction, the regular language is specified by a finite-state automaton. However, neither the original construction (Bar-Hillel et al., 1961) nor its weighted extension (Nederhof and Satta, 2003) can handle finite-state automata with ε-arcs. While it is possible to remove ε-arcs from a finite-state automaton efficiently without modifying the language, such an operation modifies the automaton's set of paths. We give a construction that generalizes the Bar- Hillel in the case the desired automaton has ε-arcs, and further prove that our generalized construction leads to a grammar that encodes the structure of both the input automaton and grammar while retaining the asymptotic size of the original construction.

On the Intersection of Context-Free and Regular Languages

Although several datasets annotated for anaphoric reference / coreference exist, even the largest such datasets have limitations in term of size, range of domains, coverage of anaphoric phenomena, and size of documents included. Yet, the approaches proposed to scale up anaphoric annotation haven't so far resulted in datasets overcoming these limitations. In this paper, we introduce a new release of a corpus for anaphoric reference labelled via a game-with-a-purpose. This new release is comparable in size to the largest existing corpora for anaphoric reference due in part to substantial activity by the players, in part thanks to the use of a new resolve-and-aggregate paradigm to ‘complete' markable annotations through the combination of an anaphoric resolver and an aggregation method for anaphoric reference. The proposed method could be adopted to greatly speed up annotation time in other projects involving games-with-a-purpose. In addition, the corpus covers genres for which no comparable size datasets exist (Fiction and Wikipedia); it covers singletons and non-referring expressions; and it includes a substantial number of long documents (\textgreater{} 2K in length).

Aggregating Crowdsourced and Automatic Judgments to Scale Up a Corpus of Anaphoric Reference for Fiction and Wikipedia Texts

Pre-trained Transformer models such as BERT have shown great success in a wide range of applications, but at the cost of substantial increases in model complexity. Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a promising method to lower the implementation cost and energy consumption. However, aggressive quantization below 2-bit causes considerable accuracy degradation due to unstable convergence, especially when the downstream dataset is not abundant. This work proposes a proactive knowledge distillation method called Teacher Intervention (TI) for fast converging QAT of ultra-low precision pre-trained Transformers. TI intervenes layer-wise signal propagation with the intact signal from the teacher to remove the interference of propagated quantization errors, smoothing loss surface of QAT and expediting the convergence. Furthermore, we propose a gradual intervention mechanism to stabilize the recovery of subsections of Transformer layers from quantization. The proposed schemes enable fast convergence of QAT and improve the model accuracy regardless of the diverse characteristics of downstream fine-tuning tasks. We demonstrate that TI consistently achieves superior accuracy with significantly lower fine-tuning iterations on well-known Transformers of natural language processing as well as computer vision compared to the state-of-the-art QAT methods.

Teacher Intervention: Improving Convergence of Quantization Aware Training for Ultra-Low Precision Transformers

Continual learning aims to accumulate knowledge to solve new tasks without catastrophic forgetting for previously learned tasks. Research on continual learning has led to the development of generative replay, which prevents catastrophic forgetting by generating pseudo-samples for previous tasks and learning them together with new tasks. Inspired by the biological brain, we propose the hippocampal memory indexing to enhance the generative replay by controlling sample generation using compressed features of previous training samples. It enables the generation of a specific training sample from previous tasks, thus improving the balance and quality of generated replay samples. Experimental results indicate that our method effectively controls the sample generation and consistently outperforms the performance of current generative replay methods.

Generative Replay Inspired by Hippocampal Memory Indexing for Continual Language Learning

With thousands of academic articles shared on a daily basis, it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest scientific findings. To overcome this problem, we introduce a new task of disentangled paper summarization, which seeks to generate separate summaries for the paper contributions and the context of the work, making it easier to identify the key findings shared in articles. For this purpose, we extend the S2ORC corpus of academic articles, which spans a diverse set of domains ranging from economics to psychology, by adding disentangled "contribution" and "context" reference labels. Together with the dataset, we introduce and analyze three baseline approaches: 1) a unified model controlled by input code prefixes, 2) a model with separate generation heads specialized in generating the disentangled outputs, and 3) a training strategy that guides the model using additional supervision coming from inbound and outbound citations. We also propose a comprehensive automatic evaluation protocol which reports the relevance, novelty, and disentanglement of generated outputs. Through a human study involving expert annotators, we show that in 79\%, of cases our new task is considered more helpful than traditional scientific paper summarization.

What's New? Summarizing Contributions in Scientific Literature

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) under weak supervision has attracted increasing research attention as it can significantly reduce the annotation cost. However, labels from weak supervision can be noisy, and the high capacity of DNNs enables them to easily overfit the label noise, resulting in poor generalization. Recent methods leverage self-training to build noise-resistant models, in which a teacher trained under weak supervision is used to provide highly confident labels for teaching the students. Nevertheless, the teacher derived from such frameworks may have fitted a substantial amount of noise and therefore produce incorrect pseudo-labels with high confidence, leading to severe error propagation. In this work, we propose Meta Self-Refinement (MSR), a noise-resistant learning framework, to effectively combat label noise from weak supervision. Instead of relying on a fixed teacher trained with noisy labels, we encourage the teacher to refine its pseudo-labels. At each training step, MSR performs a meta gradient descent on the current mini-batch to maximize the student performance on a clean validation set. Extensive experimentation on eight NLP benchmarks demonstrates that MSR is robust against label noise in all settings and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 11.4\% in accuracy and 9.26\% in F1 score.

Downloads

Next from EACL 2023

Shironaam: Bengali News Headline Generation using Auxiliary Information